“Like I’d ever.”
“I think the best you can hope for,” Lang said, “is to find out what happened to him, and for that you’d have to learn who he is. Every year that goes by makes the task more difficult.”
“Should I keep trying?”
Her mother sat at the table, hulling strawberries. Jimmy Devine loved coming home to the smell of warm treacly jam. The screen door to the back was open, the birds were chirping, the lake glistened through the birches, it was peaceful, mid-summer, it smelled fantastic, it was green and warm. Her mother’s silence filled Chloe with so much sadness, she had to turn away.
“My angel beloved,” Lang said from behind her. “My darling child. What do you hope for?”
“He promised me he would come back,” Chloe whispered. “Can you understand that?”
“I can. But he hasn’t.”
“He could’ve lost my number! I gave it to him on a piece of paper. You know how some people are with pieces of paper. They always lose them. Look at Blake.”
Lang nodded. “Perhaps he lost yours. Is that what you hope for?”
“Clearly.”
“Okay. Say you find him. He is Brad Jones, son of Bill Jones, grandson of Bud Jones, distracted phone number loser. Then what?”
Chloe’s face was turned toward the window, to outside. She heard her mother’s voice from behind her. “If he wanted you to know his real name, wouldn’t he have told you?”
“He was trying to reinvent himself,” Chloe said. “He told me that his name was not his name to disclose. He was trying to protect his father.”
“How hard is it, do you think, to get in touch with you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to get in touch with him, and I haven’t been successful, have I?”
“He would’ve had to forget your father was chief of police of a small town.”
“No, Mom,” Chloe snapped. “All he would’ve had to do was forget the name of my small town.”
Lang lowered her head. “Or that you go to the University of San Diego.”
“There are four universities in San Diego!”
“You’ve searched through fifty states for Lone Star. He can’t look through four universities? He can’t look you up on Facebook? You’re plain and prominent enough there.”
“He doesn’t have a computer. He doesn’t have a Facebook account. A thousand things. Mason is not on Facebook. Neither are you. Neither is Blake. For God’s sake!”
“What if he just moved on, Chloe?”
“Do you know how much you’re not helping?”
“I’m trying to help you work through the possible endings. Do you want to learn he’s forgotten you, and moved on?”
“I don’t want riddles from you too, Mother.”
“Not riddles. Questions.”
“Stop with the questions.”
“What if he died in that damn Afghanistan, what if his life ended years before your story begins?”
Chloe burst into tears.
Lang put down the strawberries. She got up and walked to Chloe, who, besieged with fright and desperation, actually let her mother touch her. Let her mother hug her. On Lang’s shoulder, she bent her head and bawled.
“My sweetest girl,” Lang said, gentle as a hummingbird, “I want to help you. But you haven’t thought it through.”
“You’re being truly terrible right now,” said Chloe, sniffling. “You’re being the worst. I’m going to write a story about you for advanced composition. Just wait till you see how you come off. Terrible, that’s how.” She didn’t stop her mother from touching her, embracing her.
“Leave it be, angel. Let it go, my love. Go swim, and I’ll make you your favorite honey cake.”
In the lake Chloe lay on the water float, eyes to the sky, and she lay in the hammock as the sun set, eyes to the sky, and she sat like a mute at the dinner table, eyes at her plate with her father asking every minute, “Chloe-bear, what’s the matter?” She lay on her bed up in the loft and stared at the wooden rafters, and tried to listen to her mother’s voice of reason, to her own voice of reason. She tried to heed the passing of time. She felt distant from San Diego, from Blake, from her parents, from herself. She flew to the only place she felt connected to in the universe, over the oceans and the distant miles to the room near the castle by the sea. All the windows were open because it was stifling hot, and she saw the stars over the Adriatic, and the swell of the green water, even at night, heard the occasional car passing, the laughter of women at a nearby bar. It was so vivid, and his parched voice murmuring. Chloe, sometimes you have to have faith even if you don’t have proof. Especially if you don’t. Look at my grandparents.
Binary Boys and Sentient Girls
They were standing face to face on her dock when Taylor and Joey drove up in his Explorer to have a swim and a picnic.
“What have you wrought, Chloe,” Blake said, waving to their friends. “Nobody works because of you. Taylor is going to get fired from Applebee’s. Joey hasn’t fixed a car in days. You’ve corrupted everybody with your indolent summer.”
“Who wants to work, this is way more fun,” Taylor said, putting down the towels. “What are you two up to?” And it must have looked strange. They had been standing close to the edge of the dock facing each other, Chloe all coiled up in her moroto dori Aikido position of full frontal offensive, and Blake at complete ease as if loitering.
“She is trying to show me what she has learned so far after one hundred and seventy thousand dollars worth of schooling,” said Blake, “and I’m refraining from knocking her into the water for the …”
He trailed off as she struck out, attacking with her arms, and he twisted out of her way and with the back of his forearm swatted her off the dock and into the lake. “For the—what is it, Haiku, twenty-first time, or twenty-second?” He catapulted into the water and swam after her. She swam away, giggling.
Taylor watched them, nodding wisely, as if the high school graduate understood in its entirety the ontological relativity of all metaphysical arguments. “Hey, did you know,” she said officiously as if reading from an educational manual for professors, “that your best chance of finding a compatible mate is sixteen blocks from the home where you grew up?” She plunked herself cross-legged onto the dock and opened her Redbook magazine.
“Taylor! Shut up,” Chloe said from the water. “Put down the magazine and go jump in the lake.”
“Nice. Do you want to hear the rest or no?”
“No!” Blake and Chloe both exclaimed, and laughed.
“The part I don’t get, Taylor,” said Blake, “is why such a specific number? Why not five blocks? Or thirty-three? And what if there’s no one remotely attractive enough who lives sixteen blocks away? What do you do then? How far does Joey live from you? I thought he was from New Hampshire.”
“This isn’t about me,” Taylor said. “This is about you.” Even Joey had had enough and picked her up and threw her into the lake, Redbook magazine and all.
Nothing is like bobbing on Blake’s floating dock in the deep part of the lake on an August afternoon. In a blue tankini Chloe lies on her back and he is spread out next to her in black swim trunks. She pretends to tan, but she’s just looking up at the sky. It’s quiet except for their occasional speaking; he murmurs something; she echoes back. Dad is working. Janice and Burt are at Home Depot. Mom and Ray are at the waterpark. Blake and Chloe had offered to take him, but Lang said no. She wanted to. Stay here, she said. Relax. You’ve done enough. Chloe ponders this, because she knows she’s done nothing. Literally nothing. They had swum, dived, argued about distilled spirits and the best soil for jacarandas and almost made a bet that Chloe could grow and keep a palm tree in the Maine weather if Blake would build her a greenhouse for it. They wondered whether there was any time before she flew back to drive down to the ocean and Chloe said, I see the ocean twice a week in San Diego, and he said yes, because it’s all about you. And then he added, it’s not even about th
e ocean, it’s about the drive. You know how much I like to drive. But I also like gratitude. And smiling she played along and said, why would I want to thank you for driving me to a place I don’t want to go, and he said, geez, maybe just to be polite? And she tried hard not to laugh, her body shaking from the effort. How do you know you don’t want to thank me, he said. What if you really really do—and suddenly in front of her eyes there appears a mountain and a glen full of cacti, long and tall, saguaros maybe, and not one, but myriad! What an odd vision, she thinks, and there is tremendous heat. She is hot, parched, panting, sweating. Nothing makes sense. And then Chloe hears Blake say, “Binary boys like sentient girls.”
She opens her eyes and moans. She is sitting up on the dock, leaning back on her arms. She is naked. Her blue tankini floats in the water. His blond streaked head is pressed deep into her bare breasts, into her wet nipples, his big work hands fondle her, his lips are hot in her white neck, and she is moaning, and then he pushes her down onto her back and opens her legs. And vanishes. She looks up and sees nothing but sky. Her fingers grip the edge of the dock. Her body writhes in agitated, desperately longed-for incineration. The mountains in the distance are embroidered with her scarlet cries. She reaches down, grabs hold of his shaggy head, begs him, slower slower, she doesn’t want it to end, the indiscreet things he is doing to her with his mouth are making her body curve upward, and then he gets up and stands over her, naked himself, throttle on full. She gasps, reaches for him, and—
“Chloe, are you okay? You’re whimpering.”
She reels away from him on the bobbing dock. She is wobbling, she is panting. She doesn’t say a word. Any moment she will keel over and pitch into the water. That would be a blessing. Was she only dreaming? It’s not possible! It was so real! She glances down, to check for her bathing suit. It’s disappointingly on, the blue nylon fabric covering what was just fully exposed to his eyes, to his hands, to his mouth. She feels so let down. Her body, her soul stretching over her bones like fine fevered jello, Chloe can’t look at him in her mortification and regret.
“What’s happening?” he says (in pretend confusion?).
She lies back down. She doesn’t want him to see her tremble. Big-bodied and half-naked he lies next to her. He looks normal, pleasing, twinkling, not … full on, the way he was in her reverie, and he looks at her normal too, not the way he just looked at her in the reverie when all the outrageous gifts of the universe were about to be bestowed upon her body, on the lake, in full view of eight summer homes, parents coming back, young Latvian boys running into the water, moms bringing out pitchers of lemonade, dads displaying the hunky new tools they brought back from the DIY store, maybe an impact drill or a sabre saw. Holy mother, hear my prayer. The mad beast with a thousand mouths. She can never look at him again. What’s wrong with her? It’s Blake!
Finally Chloe dares to speak. “Did you just say to me that binary boys like sentient girls, or did I dream that?”
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Blake says, after a measured pause of staring up at the drifting clouds. “Did you dream it because you wanted me to say it?”
“No, I want ontological absolutism. Just so that I don’t ascribe to you things you didn’t say.” Or ascribe to you brazen things you didn’t do.
“I didn’t say it,” Blake says. “Though I can say it right now if you want me to, because it’s true and I believe it. But I don’t always say true things that I believe.” Another gaze into the blue heavens. “Like that one.”
She dives into the water to cool herself down, and starts swimming to shore. “Must have been some dream,” he says into her back, diving in after her.
Why does that word—sentient—bang the drum of her heart, the drum of her everything, with such wanton longing? Is it because it’s a responsive word? If the girl begs to be touched, then here is a binary boy ready to touch her.
Nonchalant and Indifferent
Ray was trampling her flowers, pretending he was weeding, while Chloe and Blake straddled the picnic bench under the pines by the lake. Indifferent to the havoc Ray was wreaking in her prized garden, turned to each other, they were playing cat’s cradle with a long piece of string.
She was very good at the game, and he wasn’t good at all but, as always, pretended to be. Ray was hiding from them in the bushes, they were chatting with each other, the light was waning, the mosquitoes rising, the summer almost gone, when Chloe, her mouth full of a teasing smile, looked into Blake’s face, only inches away, and recalled the pose, the proximity, almost the same light, a third of a life ago. She inhaled a short ahh of pungent memory, blushed, and then caught the look in his eye. He was relaxed in body, but intense of expression. They stared at each other. She said nothing. He said nothing. There wasn’t a breath, just a thickening of the dusky air, and an inclination forward. He tilted his head. At her elbow, Ray nudged her. “Okay, I weed your stupid flowers,” he proclaimed. “Now what do you want me to do?”
“Go inside and fetch us some lemonade, bud,” said Blake, not taking his eyes off Chloe. His forearm rested on the table against her forearm. Their four hands were intertwined in the string.
Lang came outside. “Not lemonade, it’s time for dinner, you three. Blake, are you staying?”
Chloe blinked, exhaled, moved away. Blake held her elbow to steady her off the bench. He stood up. “Thank you, Mrs. Devine, but no. I’m coming tomorrow for Chloe’s last night. Tonight I’m having dinner with my own mother. She says she hasn’t seen me. My books were supposed to arrive today. I hope to be able to give your daughter a copy before she flies back. Maybe you can read it on the plane, Chloe?”
“I’d like that,” Chloe said. “I’ll be right in, Mom. I just need a minute.”
Lang ushered Ray inside, and Blake turned smiling to Chloe. They sat back down at the picnic table, more demurely. Chloe took a breath. Before anything else could happen, she had to ask Blake a question. Not a riddle. An actual question. She didn’t know if he knew the answer. She didn’t know if he would tell her even if he did. But she was out of options.
“Blake,” she said, “I need to ask you something …”
He leaned forward. “Yes?” The smile still played on his face.
“Do you remember the bus ride to Treblinka?”
Slightly he stiffened. “What about it?”
“Do you remember Yvette or Denise telling you about how they knew Johnny’s uncle?”
He moved away. “I think so.” His smile faded.
“They mentioned a town, either where they met the uncle or knew him from.”
“Yes, so?”
“Do you by any chance remember the name of that town? It was something like Casual, or Nonchalant, or …”
She wished she could take it back. His wounded face grew so immediately cold. She regretted asking for the ten seconds it took him to rise from the bench, to step away from her toward the clearing, to get ready to leave, to run, go back to his house, to not look back. But she didn’t regret asking after he spoke.
“Carefree,” Blake said, his face anything but.
Chloe sucked in her breath, afraid to miss a syllable. “Carefree where?”
“Carefree, Arizona.”
What relief. He remembered. “Thank you,” she mouthed to him. “Thank you.”
Without saying a word, he started to walk away.
“Bye?” she said into his back.
“Bye,” he said, the pine needles crunching under his boots.
“Blake,” she called after him. “Are you upset or something?”
“I’m not upset or something,” he said. “See ya.”
But he didn’t see her. He begged off the farewell dinner the following night, saying he had other plans, and he didn’t bring her a copy of The Blue Suitcase, and he didn’t answer his cell, but that could’ve been because he’d lost it again. When she called his house, his mother said he wasn’t there. When Chloe had walked halfway uphill to check, his truck wasn’t under the
carport.
The morning she was leaving for Logan to fly back to San Diego, he had gone out, he wasn’t even home!
“Please tell him I said goodbye, Mrs. Haul,” said a dejected Chloe, standing at his screen door.
“I will, honey. He’ll be sorry he missed you. But we’ll see you at Christmas, right?”
“My parents are coming to San Diego instead, Mrs. Haul. Please remind Blake to send me his book when he finally gets his copies.”
“What do you mean, they came days ago.” Janice shook her head. “That boy. Sometimes I don’t know about him. Wait here. He probably thought he already gave you one. You know how absent-minded he can be. Do you know he lost his phone again? Third time this summer. Boys, right?”
Janice brought out the slim tome. Glossy white cover, with nothing on the front but an embossed electric blue suitcase and Blake’s name.
She was walking back to her house, clutching the book to her chest like in high school, when his black truck came barreling up the hill. She waved and stepped to the side of the narrow road so he wouldn’t run her over. The truck slowed down, almost reluctantly, Chloe thought. She approached the driver’s window. He rolled it down, almost reluctantly. They didn’t speak for a moment.
“I got your book,” she said, showing him.
“Ah, good,” he said. “I was sure you’d left already. Isn’t your plane in a few hours?”
“Five hours,” Chloe said, frowning at his grim face, at his not getting out of the truck, at his not even putting the truck into park, judging by the vehicle’s irregular spin of black tires. “Why didn’t you bring me a copy like you said you would?”
“I was going to send it to you.” His unsmiling eyes, the color of wet sand today, looked somewhere left of her face, left of her inquiring gaze.
Her father yelled for her from down the hill. Come on, Chloe, we have to go, you’ll miss your plane.
“Better run along,” Blake said.
“Why are you upset with me?”
“I’m not upset.”
“Come on.”
“Why should I be upset? You owe me nothing. You made that clear. I’m fine.”
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